Brite Divinity School educates women and men to lead in the ministry of Christ’s church, the academy and public life as witnesses to God’s reconciling and transforming love and justice.

Biography

Shelly Matthews holds the ThD from the Harvard Divinity School, the MDiv from Boston University School of Theology, and the BA from the University of North Dakota. Before arriving at Brite in 2011, she was the Dorothy and B.H. Peace Jr., Associate Professor of Religion at Furman University, in Greenville South Carolina, where she taught for 13 years.

She is an ordained United Methodist Minister (Dakotas Area Conference), and served three years in parish ministry in North Dakota before entering graduate school.

She currently co-chairs the Society of Biblical Literature Section on Early Jewish and Christian Relations, and was the co- founder and served for six years as co-chair of the SBL section on Violence and Representations of Violence Among Jews and Christians. She also serves on editorial boards for the Journal of Biblical Literature, the Journal of New Testament Studies, and Lectio Dificilior. Her research interests include feminist biblical interpretation, the Acts of the Apostles, early Jewish Christian relations, and Paul in the second century.

Degrees

D.Th., Harvard Divinity School, 1997
M.Div, Boston University School of Theology,1987
B.A., University of North Dakota, 1984

Religion

United Methodist

Courses

Cities of Paul and John (travel course)

Exegesis in the Gopsels and Acts - Acts

Exegesis in the New Testament Epistles and Revelation: Paul, Gender, and Sexuality

Exegesis in the NT Epistles & Revelation - I Corinthians

Exegesis in the NT Epistles & Revelation - Romans

Feminist Approaches to Christian Beginnings

Interpreting the New Testament

Issues in New Testament Studies - Acts, Historiography and Apologetics

Issues in New Testament Studies - Paul and Gender Politics

Issues in New Testament Studies - The World of Paul

Books

The Acts of the Apostles: Taming the Tongues of Fire (Phoenix Guides to the New Testament 4)
Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013.

Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian Identity.
Oxford University Press, 2010.

First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and Christianity. Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Violence in the New Testament: Jesus Followers and Other Jews under Empire.
New York/London: T & T Clark International, 2005 (Co-edited with E. Leigh Gibson).

“The Need for the Stoning of Stephen.”
Pages 124-39 in Violence in the New Testament: Jesus Followers and Other Jews Under Empire. Edited by E. Leigh Gibson and Shelly Matthews. New York/London: T & T Clark International, 2005.

“Elite Women, Public Religion, and Christian Propaganda in Acts 16.”
Pages 111-33 in A Feminist Companion to Acts of the Apostles. Edited by Amy-Jill Levine. New York/London: T & T Clark, 2004.